


to keep you warm (to bring you home)

by Muir_Wolf



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Multi, OT3, Threesome - F/M/M, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 04:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16032671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/pseuds/Muir_Wolf
Summary: Sophomore year ("better the devil you know," Dwight and Jim had agreed philosophically before choosing to live together again), Pam, Dwight, and Jim roll into the same 8am history class, and oh, oh this is when trouble begins, because Roy’s there, too.Note: this walks the line of being fic and not-fic—a style I've always shied away from cross-posting here, but.  I am doing it.  Here it is.  It is done.





	to keep you warm (to bring you home)

**Author's Note:**

> (I'm honestly kind of skittish about posting this here, but I've quibbled about it enough in my head, and the thing is: I'm never going to have the sort of time to devote to turning it into a 40k fic. So this is it. The heartbeats of it are all there. I think it stands okay. I'm sorry if it doesn't!)  
>   
> Originally written Jan 26, 2016.
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> 

This is a story about Pam, because Pam starts out in a major she doesn’t want to be in. Freshman year, Pam is at the same college as Roy, because Roy got a sports scholarship there. Roy isn’t good enough to go major league, but he’s enjoying his time at college (she’s fairly sure he’s cheating on her but she has no real proof yet), and Roy is planning on becoming a high school PE teacher, and because Roy fully expects Pam to follow him wherever he goes for the rest of her goddamn life, Pam is currently, sort-of, kind of, planning to be a high school English teacher.

 _We can fuck in the teacher’s lounge,_ Roy says, his breath too warm against her face, and the thing that will be hard to explain later is that she _does love_ Roy. She does love him. He never remembers her birthday and can never seem to get her off, but she’s known him most of her life, and he’s _such a catch,_ god, she’s going to throw up if she has to hear one more person tell her that _he’s such a catch,_ and she knows, she does, that no one knows why he’s with her. (She was his tutor in high school.  That’s how they got together. She tutored him in high school and one night he coaxed her glasses off, coaxed her hair down, coaxed her back onto her bed.) And this, this is what is hard to explain later, too, because Roy _loves her._ She knows he has other options, is almost positive he’s cheating on her, but he still looks at her sometimes like she’s his whole world, and every time he’s ever talked about the future, she’s right beside him in it. He loves her, and sometimes, sometimes it feels like she should be _grateful_ for his loving her, for the amount he loves her if not the way he loves her. Maybe it’s not—not exactly what she—but that doesn’t matter. She’s _lucky_ he loves her, isn’t she? Isn’t she lucky?

Meanwhile, Dwight and Jim are roommates. Their story is simple: Dwight drives Jim up the fucking wall, and so Jim returns the favor.

(Their story is less simple: Jim is pretty much guaranteed a place at more than one frat if he wants it, and Dwight has every chance in the world to get a new roommate. They’re literally asked point blank after another “accident” (slash prank war) whether they wouldn’t prefer living in different rooms, and they both, remarkably defiantly, said _no._ They went out to lunch together, and explained in great detail to each other exactly why they weren’t going to back down or run from a fight, and didn’t dwell too much on the fact that Dwight always wakes Jim up if Jim’s going to miss class, that Jim always grabs Dwight food from the cafeteria when Dwight is cramming and forgets to eat, that Dwight helps Jim with math, and Jim proofreads Dwight’s papers. It would be a pain to move their shit, they say, they’re not giving the other the pleasure, they say. It’s easier to stay.)

Sophomore year ( _better the devil you know,_ Dwight and Jim had agreed philosophically before choosing to live together again), Pam, Dwight, and Jim roll into the same 8am history class, and oh, oh this is when trouble begins, because Roy’s there, too. (Roy’s grades slipped Freshman year, so Roy has decided spending more time with his girl is not just nice for the eyes but might also help out the GPA.) Except Roy’s always ( _always_ ) skipping class, especially Mondays, because there’s not been one Monday in college that he’s woken up before noon. And Jim is smart, and also cracks sly, witty jokes in class, that even the professor appreciates, and the second month into the semester, when Roy’s basically completely abandoned the class, Jim decides to adopt the pretty, quiet girl who always gets straight A’s on their papers, but is possibly getting docked on their mandatory participation grade.  Besides, Dwight’s always going off about some nonsense or other in Jim’s ear, and Jim’s made Pam smile twice, across the room, and it’ll be like a game, he thinks, trying to get her to smile more. So he starts sitting by her in class, and sure enough Dwight moves with him, and Pam slowly starts talking more, starts refuting Jim’s ideas quietly, and then finally louder, so the whole class can hear her.

Pam’s got a job at the college library, because while she has some scholarship money, it’s not like Roy’s full ride. And Dwight likes to go to the library sometimes, and when he runs into Pam there, he starts talking to her, sometimes, when he’s checking out a book or printing a page out near the circulation desk when it’s slow. The first couple of times, Pam’s eyes slide past him, like she’s expecting someone to be with him, but as the semester goes on her eyes are warm when she sees Dwight coming up.

Second semester sophomore year starts with a big, big fight between Pam and Roy, because Roy failed the history class he took with her, and he accuses her of spending more time flirting with Jim than helping Roy. (Pam explains Roy would have to _be in class_ for her to help, and that goes about as well as expected.) Pam accuses Roy of cheating, and Roy accuses Pam of flirting with Dwight, too, and Pam dumps him there, on the spot, and has to move into a double with two girls already in it, making it a triple, to get out of her room with Roy.

She’s still working at the library, and Dwight runs into her in the library stairwell the night after the fight, when she’s working the closing shift but had to get away to cry, and he sits down next to her and puts his hand on her shoulder and doesn’t know what to do. When he leaves, he tells Jim, because he’s certain Jim will have a better way to help Pam, and sure enough Jim, who knows every single person on campus, fixes it so that Pam moves into their dorm building, on their hall, and she’s back to two in a room. Jim and Dwight spend the rest of the semester walking her to class and meeting her for lunch and reminding her that she’s got friends, because right after she dumped oh-so-popular jock Roy there was more attention on her than she’s ever had in her life, and a lot of it wasn’t positive. And they’re with her when she goes to the registrar and changes her major to art.

Junior year, they’re allowed to move off campus, and Jim finds this great house, three bedrooms, up for rent. It’s practically a _song._ He calls Dwight (Dwight hates texting, and Jim obviously hates that about Dwight) and tells him about it, and it’s long after that that Jim realizes he just assumed that Dwight would live with him, that he approached it like “hey here’s a house for us check it out.” Either way, Dwight agrees. Dwight’s the one that suggests Pam, which is nice, because Jim really, really wanted to suggest Pam, but didn’t know how.

So junior year, Pam and Dwight and Jim live in the same house. And the thing with that is that Pam walks into the kitchen in the morning in her robe, wet hair, and sleepy eyes.  Pam curls up on the couch in comfy sweats as they watch _another season of Battlestar Galatica why does Dwight hate us so much._ Pam, existing in the same house. It’s fraying Jim’s nerves and ability to control erections. It turns out Dwight actually enjoys cooking, and it turns out Pam doesn’t mind cleaning, and it turns out Jim will attempt to fix absolutely anything for which he can find a youtube video re: fixing it. They work on homework together, just quietly in the same space, and Jim’s still trying to prank Dwight but only when it won’t mess with Dwight’s classes or interfere with anyone’s very rare sleeping.

And then it’s the _summer._ And they’ve had plenty of summers before (well, two), but this one’s different, because they were living together maybe more than they all realized. Pam’s home, working, and Jim’s on vacation with some high school buddies, and Dwight’s working on the family farm, and Pam _misses_ them. Like it’s an actual living thing, her missing them. It exists, and it walks to work with her, and sits beside her at the dinner table. Jim snapchats them _constantly,_ like oh my god, _constantly,_ and Dwight emails or calls them (he _hates_ texting, Jim likes to call him an old man), and Pam kind of drops off the face of the earth, so it’s just her and her missing them. They miss her, too, miss her more when she drops off the face of the earth, miss each other, too.  But Pam’s working at a diner for the summer, just like she has for the last two years, and she’s thinking about what she’s supposed to do with an art degree, thinking that they only have one year left so she should get used to missing them, thinking that Roy was so safe, so fucking _safe,_ and now she’s on such rocky ground, rocky ground and _missing them,_ and what’s she supposed to do about that? What’s she supposed to do when she graduates?

The last month of summer, her boss at the diner—Michael—he sees her sketching something on her break, and he sits down next to her, asks to see her sketchbook, tells her enthusiastically how good she is. The last month, at his request, she paints a mural on the side of the restaurant. It’s taller than she is, so much brighter than she is, and sweat clings to her neck as she works, her fingers ache as she works, and she’s never felt better in her entire life.

She texted Jim that she was fine with living with them again, but the boys arrive back at the house first, and they’re quietly worried that she isn’t going to show up, because she’s been _so_ MIA over the summer. But she does show up. She has more art supplies this year, and she looks tired when she comes in the door, but she looks…happier. Happier than she sounded over the summer.

They throw themselves into their final year, and after the first week it’s like nothing has changed—they sprawl out on the couch, they eat together, they watch TV together. Except something _has_ changed. Something about Pam has changed.

Jim wants to throw a big Halloween costume party at their place, and Pam laughs and agrees, and she helps them with their costumes, and the party’s a huge success, and the cops don’t show up to disband it until almost midnight. And then it’s the three of them, sitting on the steps in front of the house, crammed together into too small a place, but no one wants to move. Jim’s just grabbed three more beers, and handed them out, and Pam’s there in the middle of them, and she’s looking at her knees, looking at Dwight and Jim’s knees pressed against her knees. She’s looking at their knees, and she’s thinking about that physical feeling of missing them, looking at their knees and thinking about how it felt when she was splattered in paint and thinking she could do anything she wanted.

 _I missed you both,_ she says. Says it soft and steady. Dwight nods, but Jim’s back straightens, a little. (Jim, who’d been traveling all over with his high school friends, and yet still tethered to his phone, waiting to hear from her, waiting to talk to Dwight.) He wants—not to question her, maybe, but—but she cuts him off before he can speak. _I just had to figure some things out._

They don’t ask her _what_ she had to figure out, although the question lies in Jim’s throat like a rock. They drink the rest of their beers, instead, their knees pressing together, their arms pressing together.

Pam hasn’t had an exact name for what she’s wanted, but she does now.

Pam doesn’t want to go home for Christmas this year. She expects the others to, but Dwight shrugs it off, and Jim somehow slides out of his family’s expectations. And it’s winter, and there’s no classes, and nobody else, and they have three weeks—three glorious weeks. After this, just one last semester, and then—then what? She asks it out loud, one morning. Jim’s turning all their coffees Irish, and Dwight’s just taken cookies out of the oven, and she asks them what she’s been avoiding asking them, what’s after _this_ for them. 

And Jim does the same thing he did for the house, he’s asking her and Dwight along before they get to that part. Jim’s saying he could probably get a job anywhere, so it depends if Dwight or Pam have to be somewhere specific, that it depends if Pam wants to be in a more artsy city, if Dwight could put up with a more artsy city. Dwight’s debating the merits of Portland with Jim, like he thinks this is a normal thing to do, too, that they’re deciding to stay together over Irish coffee on a cold, cold winter morning, that they decided before this, maybe, because neither of them seem unsure about tying their lives to each other’s, to hers. Neither of them seems at all uncertain.

Jim put mistletoe all over the house, and he bullied Dwight into helping. It was a little over a week ago, right before the semester ended, and Jim was doing his damnedest to avoid finishing a paper, and that was his solution. Dwight ended up micro-managing the entire ordeal, because that’s what he does, and Pam had been sitting at the kitchen table, studying for a final, when they got to the kitchen. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table, just like she is right now, when they started standing on chairs and climbing on the counter, and when they’d finished they’d ended up sitting down with her, and Dwight had made her coffee, had made her and Jim coffee, because Jim had finally got his laptop and started to work on the essay, had made her and Jim and Dwight himself coffee, because Dwight didn’t have anything else left to do, but he’d come down and played on his computer and stayed up half the night keeping them company.

The mistletoe is still up there. It’s deniability, if she wants it. If she wants deniability. But she doesn’t. Not anymore.

They’re both short kisses, because she doesn’t want either of them to think the other isn’t invited. She kisses Jim, first, and then she kisses Dwight, and then she sits back, fighting that lifelong urge to run, to take the easy path, to not fight for what she wants.

She sits there, instead, her hands cupping her mug of Irish coffee, her eyes on her hands cupping her mug of Irish coffee.

 _Pam?_ Jim asks. Dwight’s words are an echo behind Jim’s, but Dwight’s hand reaches her first, settles on her wrist.

 _I missed you_ both, she says. _I missed_ both _of you._

Jim’s hand is resting on her other wrist, now, right across from Dwight’s hand. Hands which have offered a hand up, have tickled her, have covered her eyes, have offered her food, have bodily lifted her off the ground, have held her purse for her, have wiped food off her face, have wiped food _onto_ her face, have written her letters and texted her and emailed her and dialed her number to call her. Have wiped tears off her face in a stairwell. Have helped her carry her things from her old building to her new one. From her car to this house. Their house.

 _Okay_ , Jim says, like he’s still searching out exactly what this means, exactly what this means for _them_ , because Jim’s still mapping out a future where the three of them are going to take the world by storm. His skin is warm against hers.

Dwight shifts, though. Dwight stands up, and lets go of her so he can walk behind her, until Dwight’s on her other side, on Jim’s side. Dwight reaches out for her again, puts his hand on the same arm that Jim’s hand is on, and Jim’s eyes are wide when he looks at Dwight, but Dwight’s eyes are steady, Dwight’s face is _steady_ when he cups the back of Jim’s neck with his free hand and kisses him. Dwight is steady everywhere except for his hand on Pam’s arm, so Pam puts her free hand on top of his and squeezes tight.

Jim kisses Dwight back, and then kisses Pam, again, and then kisses Dwight, again, and Pam’s smiling when Jim drags his free hand across his finally free face, looking a little bit poleaxed and quite a bit pleased.

 _Okay,_ Jim says again, and she can practically see the cogs turning in his head, and she wonders what he’s thinking—changing bedroom size, changing _bed_ size in their imaginary new house? Somewhere progressive enough that this won’t be a problem? Already five steps ahead of where they are, even in this? _Okay,_ Jim says, and then he’s grabbing both Dwight and Pam’s hands, and he’s pulling them backwards, up to the stairs, and it’s only when they see the look in Jim’s eyes that they let themselves be pulled. Up the stairs, down the hallway, to the bedroom.

 _Okay,_ Jim says, laughing, his hands tugging at their clothes, and they’re quick to follow suit.

(Afterwards: Pam grabs the comforter that fell off the bed and pulls it back over them.

Afterwards: They finish their last semester and move in together, officially. They still have three bedrooms because they don’t always sleep together, but more and more often they’ve started sleeping in Pam’s room. Sometimes Pam goes to bed early and when she wakes up, Jim and Dwight have just appeared in her room, in her bed, in the middle of the night.

Afterwards: Pam gets a part-time job teaching art, and spends the rest of her time doing murals.)

Pam’s favorite sketch that she’s ever done is Dwight and Jim tangled together in her bed that very first time. The afternoon sun is just coming in the windows. There’s a space between their bodies, where Pam had been before she’d climbed out to sketch them.  There’s a space between their bodies, waiting for her.

Pam puts the sketch down, and goes back to bed.

  
  


_finis_


End file.
